The Go Cart Murder Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 19 - The Go Cart Murder
MICHAEL PARK: From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland, a podcast about history and the places we made it. I’m Michael Park.
On the Drygate, just off Duke Street and round the corner from the Tennent’s and Drygate breweries, there’s a wall which sits in the middle of a housing scheme. It’s not a wall you’d pay any attention to as you walked by it, it’s not a wall that cries out for your attention, daubed in murals or graffiti. It’s a pretty standard looking old wall, emblazoned only with a plaque which reads 1871 and shows a coat of arms of Glasgow.
But if this wall could talk, what stories it could tell, provided the wall also had the capacity to form coherent sentences. After all, it’s just a prison wall.
On 10th October 1923, the wall would have seen a woman walk across the yard to the gallows. It would have seen her climb the steps, and stand silently for a moment as the guards from Duke Street jail milled around her and the two nuns who came to offer what little solace they could in her final moments. Eyes appeared at windows, beady, expectant.
If the wall could talk it would say that when the executioner went to put the white hood on to hide the ungodly expression that would cross her face when the noose tightened, and snapped her neck, she told him
SUSAN NEWALL: ‘Don’t put that thing over my head’
MICHAEL PARK: Susan Newall died that day for what she had done - what she maintained until her last day that she hadn’t done.
Her life had been an unhappy one. She was divorced and had remarried but her husband, John Newall, was a real piece of work and they argued constantly until one night she beat seven bells out of him and he ran off to stay with his sister. Susan Newall didn’t kill her womanising husband, but she did kill the next person she saw.
John Johnson, the 13 year old paper boy had come to collect his due from the flats. She flew into a rage when he asked for money for the papers and choked him, beating him around the head as she did so. Nobody was really sure which part had killed him.
She dragged the body into an old go cart - the kind people used to use to haul things from place to place - not the kind you race and hitched a lift to Duke Street with a lorry driver who was oblivious to the dead boy in the cart.
She wasn’t so lucky when she got to Glasgow. Someone noticed a lifeless arm poking out from under the bundle she’d used to disguise the boy and went to get the police. They found her a few doors down from where she dumped the body, holding her six year old daughter’s hand as she hurried along the road. The little girl had been there throughout the whole thing.
She claimed that her husband had actually killed him and had forced her to move the body to cover his tracks. The police arrested John Newall straight away before his several watertight alibis, which put him at his brother’s funeral in Haddington, really put the sword to Susan’s story.
It was the testimony of wee Janet McLeod, the little girl who had been dragged by the hand through the whole grizzly affair, that sent her mother to the gallows. She told the court that Susan had killed the boy and told her what to say if they were questioned by police - she was to tell them that her step father had done it. She even admitted to helping her mother wrap the body.
Susan eventually pled insanity. It was rejected. She was found guilty by a jury of fifteen men who recommended that mercy be shown.
It wasn’t.
She reached the end of the rope in the yard Duke Street jail, just yards from where she was caught, on a rainy Wednesday in October 1923. The first woman to be executed in Scotland since Jessie King in 1889 - she was also the last.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland. It was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by rotor Cipher, Mitch Bain. Find more of his amazing tracks by searching Mitch Bain Music on Facebook.
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